A wise, upper-middle-class friend told me her children will not inherit anything because their private school and college tuitions gobbled it all up. Let’s face it: We have a public education crisis of epic proportions.
For the lower classes, who strive to make sure their children do better than they did, the American Dream is fading.
For the middle class and upper-middle class, the choice is either to trade off a potential retirement or consign one’s children to decades of debt in order to receive a strong education.
New York City’s public schools have been on a downward cycle for almost five decades and, although the Bloomberg administration made modest strides in the past decade in certain areas, the usually confident mayor recently told The Atlantic “we didn’t move the needle enough.”
His successor will have to move the needle dramatically and quickly to ensure we do not allow another generation of kids to fail by dropping out, failing to be college-ready or failing to have the skills necessary for a 21st-century job.
The high school graduation rate is up from 45 percent to 60 percent since Bloomberg took office, but three quarters of those who graduate and enter our city university system need remedial education.
The city has created more than 100 charter schools in underserved neighborhoods, offering parents choices where none existed before. More than 50,000 kids are on waiting lists for charter schools, a good sign they are a desirable option for parents who live in neighborhoods with failing public schools.
But charter schools only serve 50,000 kids in New York, less than 5 percent of the population of school-aged children. And the amount of political dueling that has resulted from charter school openings in middle-class neighborhoods and their co-location with other public schools has detracted from the need to focus on teacher training and professional development at all public schools.
Our next mayor must pick a city schools chancellor who can win over the city’s parents, be a champion for teacher training and demand principals be master instructors whose evaluations of teachers are respected and welcomed.
We need a mayor who will build a world-class network of career and technical high schools that will reduce drop-out rates and lead to well-paying jobs for our most disaffected learners.
We need a mayor who will focus less on closing “failing” schools and more on rebuilding our crumbling public schools, expand broadband capabilities, incorporate technology into teaching and rely less on constant testing and measuring.
Unfortunately, none of the current field of mayoral candidates has offered a plan for fixing our public school problem.
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan) has spoken about “teacher mentoring” programs, but she has provided few other specifics on how she would deviate from Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s top-down approach.
City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio’s plan to expand early childhood education is a worthy goal, but then he ruins it by saying he would fund it through a tax on the wealthy — a non-starter Albany would never greenlight.
Anthony Weiner has offered only platitudes and shallow ideas on education, and his plan to eliminate parent coordinators in the schools will further antagonize disaffected parents.
Bill Thompson has a solid background in education — he was president of the city Board of Education in the 1990s — and the support of the state Regents Chancellor Meryl Tisch, but so far he has not articulated a coherent plan to improve our schools dramatically.
John Catsimatidis has been the only candidate touting the need for restoring technical education, but he needs to spell out how he would implement and fund that idea.
And Joe Lhota’s education ideas have not been fully formed yet either.
After public safety, public education is the most important issue of the 2013 mayoral campaign. Clearly, the eager civic students dashing for City Hall have a lot of homework to do.
They all deserve a grade of incomplete.
Tom Allon, president of City & State media, was a Republican and Liberal Party-backed mayoral candidate in 2013 before he left the race to return to the private sector. Reach him at tallon@cityandstateny.com
